Free Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer by John Grisham Page B

shrugged. He never denied that he possessed a sizable knowledge of the law. “I understand a lot of it,” he said. “What’s up?”
    “This big trial, is it Mr. Duffy?”
    “Yes, he’s on trial for murder. And it is a big trial.”
    “Can we talk about it?”
    “Sure,” Theo said. “May I ask why?”
    “Maybe I know something.”
    Theo studied his eyes. Julio looked away, as if he’d done something wrong. An assistant principal yelled at some students to stop mingling and get inside. Theo and Julio headed for the door.
    “I’ll find you during lunch,” Theo said.
    “Good. Thanks.”
    “No problem.”
    As if Theo didn’t have enough of the Duffy trial on his mind, now he had even more. A lot more. What could a homeless twelve-year-old from El Salvador possibly know about the murder of Myra Duffy?
    Nothing, Theo decided as he walked to homeroom. He said good morning to Mr. Mount as he unpacked his backpack. He was not happy. The trial, the biggest trial in the history of Strattenburg, would start again in half an hour, and he would not be there. There is no justice, he decided.
    During the morning recess, Theo sneaked away to the library and hid in a study carrel. He pulled out his laptop and went to work.
    The court reporter assigned to the Duffy trial was a Ms. Finney. She was the best in town, according to what Theo had heard around the courthouse. As in every trial, Ms. Finney sat at the foot of the bench, below the judge and next to the witness chair. It was the best seat in the house, and rightfully so. Her job was to record every word spoken by the judge, the lawyers, the witnesses, and, finally, the jury. Using her stenograph machine, Ms. Finney could easily take down 250 words a minute.
    In the old days, according to Mrs. Boone, the court reporters used shorthand, a method of recording that included symbols and codes and abbreviations and pretty much anything else they needed to keep up with the dialogue. After the trial, the court reporter would translate the shorthand to a typed, neat transcript of what was said during the trial. This would take days, even weeks, sometimes months, and was hard work.
    But now, thanks to technology, the recording was far easier. And, better still, it produced an instant record of the trial. There were at least four desktop computers in the courtroom—one on the bench for Judge Gantry, one on the defense table, one for the prosecutor, and one for the court clerk. As Ms. Finney captured every word, the text was translated, formatted, and zipped into the system so that the four computers ran the proceedings in real time.
    Often, in a trial, there is a dispute over what a witness said or did not say. Years earlier, the judge would be forced to call time-out while the poor court reporter scurried through her notepads, found her shorthand scribblings, and recounted what she’d written. Now, though, the record was instant and far more reliable.
    Ms. Finney shared an office on the third floor with several other court reporters. Their software system was called Veritas. Theo had hacked into it before when he’d been curious about something that happened in court.
    It was not a secure system because the information was available in open court. Anyone could walk into the courtroom and watch the trial. Anyone, of course, who was not confined by the rigors of middle school. Even though Theo couldn’t be there in person, he certainly planned to know what was happening.
    He hadn’t missed much. The first witness of the second day was a security chief who worked the front gate at Waverly Creek. There were only two gates—the front and the south. Both had gatehouses that were staffed by at least one armed and uniformed guard around the clock. Both had multiple surveillance cameras. Using video records, the security chief testified that Mr. Duffy, or at least Mr. Duffy’s car, had left through the front gate at 6:48 a.m. on the day of the murder, and had returned at 10:22